Human existence means transcendence and constant action, not passive repose

Evidence

This sounds a sensible proposal, but Beauvoir’s essay tells us to think again. For her, a man who wants to stop and navel-gaze is not as good a model as the one who commits himself to keep going. Why do we imagine that wisdom lies in inactivity and detachment, she asks? If a child says, ‘I don’t care about anything,’ that is not a sign of a wise child but of a troubled and depressed one. Similarly, adults who withdraw from the world soon get bored. Even lovers, if they retreat to their private love nest for too long, lose interest in each other. We do not thrive in satiety and rest. Human existence means ‘transcendence’, or going beyond, not ‘immanence’, or reposing passively inside oneself. It means constant action until the day one runs out of things to do — a day that is unlikely to come as long as you have breath. For Beauvoir and Sartre, this was the big lesson of the war years: the art of life lies in getting things done. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 516

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clearly defines the Beauvoir/Sartre pair transcendence vs immanence, a load-bearing existentialist concept.
• XREF: Transcendence/immanence connects to the bad-faith and authenticity discussions running through the existentialist literature, and to Heidegger’s being-toward-world. — connects to: Life and action are identical in nature as transcended transcendence; Every human act expresses the whole person, not a fragment — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1334; Existence precedes essence and carries a subjective quality in human reality. (+9 more)

Broader Connections

• Human beings are processes of their own actions, not fixed essences #corroborates (0.85) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1256
• For consciousness, existence precedes and grounds any essence #expands (0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 137